Russia's Cultural Revolution

Published: September 20, 1998

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I might, as a fellow petroved (Peter freak), beg to differ with Hughes here and there, but I won't. Too much of what she says seems to me right on target. Her exhaustive research in Russian sources, including archives in Russia in company with leading Russian specialists, is virtually faultless. The attention she pays to Peter's opponents in Russia, to his court, both mock and real, to family and friends, to women -- to people --can only be welcomed, and should be weighed against her somewhat perfunctory if lengthy treatment of war and diplomacy, economics and government. Her detailed depiction of developments in education, the fine arts, book culture and language is also most welcome, and similarly distinguishes her book from its rivals. Sex, music, medicine, dress, manners, hair codes -- seemingly nothing of any consequence is ignored.

On larger matters, Hughes demonstrates that Russia's ''international status had grown immeasurably'' under Peter, but then asks, in effect, ''so what?'' Acknowledging that ''in a number of respects Russia was a very different place . . . when Peter died from what it had been . . . when he came to the throne,'' she demands to know: ''But did change mean 'progress,' and did progress mean improvement? Was Russia better or worse off as a result of Peter's reforms?'' Like a good teacher, she doesn't really tell us what she thinks, but we emerge from her course invigorated, our noses well rubbed in the data, ready to argue with the historians, politicians and ideologues she quotes and eager to advance our own views.

My own construction of much of the evidence adduced by Hughes and others is that what happened of greatest historical consequence in Russia under Peter was a kind of cultural revolution -- a term that Hughes hazards a time or two but then, oddly, drops. From a position on the fringes, at best, of Europe, Russia by Peter's death had become a full member of the European state system and had begun the process of economic integration.

But these political and economic developments, sudden yet long lasting, major not minor, inevitably bore innumerable cultural connotations, as did Peter's vast expansion of Russia's armed forces and his creation of a Russian Navy; and all was done in close accord with prevailing European norms (techniques, practices, values), hitherto largely or wholly unknown in Russia. Add to this the deliberate importation of European learning and dress codes (elite Russians had previously dressed in what Europeans regarded as ''Oriental,'' Turkish-style attire), the creation of St. Petersburg, the foundation of a Russian Academy of Sciences and so forth, and we have on our hands nothing less than a full-scale cultural revolution. How to evaluate it is another question entirely, and one that has produced, in fact, most of the controversy.

We need consider only the verbal dimension of Peter's revolution to see the point clearly. Hughes cites the figures: some 3,500 new words -- German, French, Dutch, English, Italian, Swedish in origin -- entered Russian in Peter's period, roughly one-fourth of them shipping and naval terms, one-fourth administrative, one-fourth military and one-fourth other (commercial, medical, mathematical, architectural, you name it). Many of these borrowings, Hughes concedes (I would guess most, but much work remains to be done in this area), ''remain in the vocabulary today.'' This was a lexical invasion, deliberately promoted, of entirely unprecedented scope in Russia (perhaps anywhere) and is as sure an indicator of a cultural revolution as one could ask for.

THE revolution had its visual component, too, a point that Hughes also documents. One chapter begins: ''There are few better places to experience the palpable differences between late Muscovite and Petrine culture than in Russia's national art collections,'' where, as she leads us through the rooms, the iconic representations of dead saints typical for centuries of Russian visual culture suddenly give way to naturalistic portraiture, ''a gallery of royal personages, ladies and gentlemen indistiguishable in dress and hairstyle, if not always in the quality of the painting, from their European counterparts.'' But she immediately asks ''to what extent do the selected images in the Petrine portrait gallery reflect Russian reality?'' (what's ''real''?), and we are treated to pages of often fascinating information derived from visual sources -- buildings, coins, sculpture and prints as well as paintings (flags, seals, maps, coats of arms and medals might have been added) -- accompanied by commentary suggesting that our guide is either not sure what it all means or is too reticent to tell us.

Hughes's approach to the history of Peter's era is scarcely touched by the turn to social science in recent British-American history writing, still less by the advent of culture studies (the term ''discourse'' does not appear even once in her hundreds of pages of text and notes). Nor does she provide more than a cursory review of the historical scholarship on Peter, or any systematic source criticism. Still, this is not a book for the casual reader, nor even your average history buff, who might well find its detail overwhelming. This is rather a scholar's compilation, so organized -- with its full index and bibliography, lengthy chronology of events and topical arrangement of chapters and sections -- as to facilitate ready reference, the whole attractively printed with an absolute minimum of gaffes, all as befits the leading British authority on the subject and her distinguished publisher.

James Cracraft, a professor of history and university scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is the author of ''The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery'' and editor of ''Peter the Great Transforms Russia.''